Ministry of Science and Technology Issues Guidelines to Regulate AI Use, Prohibiting Direct Generation of Application Materials via AIGC - In-Depth Research and Analysis on the Development Status of the AIGC Industry Market
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The Supervision Department of the Ministry of Science and Technology recently compiled and issued the 'Guidelines for Responsible Research Conduct (2023),' which stipulate that generative artificial intelligence must not be used to directly generate application materials, nor should it be listed as a co-author of research outcomes. The guidelines also emphasize that researchers must integrate scientific and technological ethics throughout the entire research process.
The guidelines apply to research institutions, universities, medical and health institutions, enterprises, and their researchers, covering the main stages and processes of scientific and technological activities. Regarding the release of research outcomes, the guidelines stress that breakthrough research results and significant research progress should only be made public with the approval of the respective research institution.
Researchers must not disseminate unverified or non-peer-reviewed research findings to the public. They are also prohibited from republishing already published papers or their data, images, etc., or piecing together 'new outcomes' by combining parts of multiple published papers.
2023 has been a landmark year for thematic investments in the A-share market, with the AI wave dominating throughout. Whether in hardware (e.g., CPO, computing power) or applications (e.g., AIGC), market enthusiasm has been continuously fueled. In the second half of the year, Huawei-related concepts surged strongly, with sectors like Huawei smartphones, Huawei cars, and Huawei HarmonyOS taking center stage.
Additionally, sectors such as robotic reducers, data rights confirmation, and short drama games have become hotspots investors cannot ignore. In terms of growth, the AIGC sector led the market with a 63.41% increase, while the CPO sector also saw a yearly rise of over 50%.
Generative artificial intelligence (AIGC) marks a significant milestone in the transition from AI 1.0 to AI 2.0. The convergence of technologies like GAN, CLIP, Transformer, Diffusion, pre-trained models, multimodal techniques, and generative algorithms has catalyzed the explosion of AIGC. Continuous algorithmic innovation, the qualitative leap in AIGC capabilities driven by pre-trained models, and the diversification of AIGC content through multimodal approaches have endowed AIGC with more versatile and robust foundational capabilities.
From the progression of computational intelligence to perceptual intelligence and then to cognitive intelligence, AIGC has opened the door to cognitive intelligence for human society. By training on large-scale datasets, AI has acquired knowledge across multiple domains. With appropriate model adjustments, it can now perform tasks in real-world scenarios.
The AIGC industry chain is divided into three main segments: upstream (underlying logic and algorithm/data provision, including data suppliers, creator ecosystems, foundational tools, and open-source algorithms), midstream (content generation, such as text, images, and digital humans), and downstream (content application and model/algorithm usage).
AIGC holds milestone significance for both human society and artificial intelligence. In the short term, it transforms basic productivity tools; in the medium term, it reshapes societal production relations; and in the long term, it drives qualitative breakthroughs in overall social productivity. In this transformation of productivity tools, production relations, and productivity itself, the value of data as a production factor is greatly amplified. AIGC elevates data to the status of a core resource of the era, accelerating the digital transformation of society to some extent.
In-Depth Research and Analysis on the Development Status of the AIGC Industry Market
Statistics show that China's digital economy reached approximately 50 trillion yuan in 2022, and is projected to grow to 56.1 trillion yuan in 2023, reflecting the successful development of China's digital economy. As the scale of China's digital economy continues to expand, digital consumption models are becoming more readily accepted by consumers. Meanwhile, enterprises are joining the digital transformation wave, creating development opportunities for the AIGC industry.
Deep learning models have undergone continuous iterations, leading to breakthrough progress in AIGC. Particularly in 2022, algorithms experienced explosive development, and breakthroughs in underlying technologies made AIGC commercialization possible. This progress has been mainly concentrated in the field of AI painting: in June 2014, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) were proposed.
In February 2021, OpenAI introduced the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) multimodal pre-training model. By 2022, Diffusion Models gradually replaced GAN.
AIGC is an artificial intelligence technology built on multimodality, meaning a single model can simultaneously understand language, images, videos, audio, and perform tasks that single-modal models cannot accomplish, such as adding text descriptions to videos or generating images based on semantic context.
Currently, domestic AIGC mostly appears in the form of single-model applications, primarily divided into text generation, image generation, video generation, and audio generation, with text generation serving as the foundation for other content generation.
The AI industry chain mainly consists of three layers: the foundational layer, the technical layer, and the application layer. The foundational layer focuses on building basic support platforms, including sensors, AI chips, data services, and computing platforms. The technical layer emphasizes the research and development of core technologies, mainly comprising algorithm models, basic frameworks, and general technologies. The application layer concentrates on industrial applications, primarily including industry solution services, hardware products, and software products.
Research has found that China's AIGC industry chain structure mainly consists of five parts: foundational large models, industry/scenario medium models, business/domain small models, AI infrastructure, and AIGC supporting services, forming a rich industrial ecosystem.
International AIGC commercialization starts with foundational large models, including typical applications like ChatGPT and Midjourney, which are incubated based on calls to foundational large models. Domestically, the situation is reversed. Due to China's market with extremely rich business scenarios and highly fragmented supply-side services, current AIGC commercialization begins with business/domain small models.
Foundational large models are still in a stage of rapid iteration and upgrading, while also beginning to focus on specific business scenarios. The market for industry/scenario medium models is relatively more lagging, but under China's unique market conditions, this will be an area where both foundational large models and domain small models will actively cross over in the future.
Data shows that the core market size of China's AIGC industry was 1.15 billion yuan in 2022, projected to reach 7.93 billion yuan in 2023 and 166.53 billion yuan by 2026. With the continuous development of artificial intelligence technology, AIGC technology will become increasingly mature.
AIGC experienced explosive growth at the end of 2022. With the mutual promotion of three key elements—data, algorithms, and computing power—the intelligence level of AI models continues to rise, gradually awakening AI's "creative intelligence." As artificial intelligence technology continues to advance and break through, generative AI is accelerating its penetration into fields such as text, images, and audio/video. The AIGC track continues to attract new tech giants.
In February 2023, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would establish a top-tier product team dedicated to AIGC. Meanwhile, YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, declared it was developing AIGC content creation tools. Prior to this, overseas giants such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Buzzfeed had already deployed related service products.
AIGC Industry Market Future Development Trends and Potential Forecast
China's artificial intelligence industry has entered a phase of explosive growth, driven by collective efforts from various stakeholders, with immense market development potential. Data shows that in 2020, the core industry scale of artificial intelligence in China reached 150 billion yuan, and it is expected to grow to 400 billion yuan by 2025, potentially becoming the world's largest artificial intelligence market in the future. The emergence of AIGC will significantly unleash human imagination, ushering in a "new art wave" of this era.